by Daniel Gilbert
You may think you know what makes you happy and… you are probably wrong! This book is a great read especially if you ever worked hard to satisfy your future self, only to find out that it didn’t bring the future you the happiness intended. Apparantly the mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal future are lawful, regular and systematic.
Daniel Gilbert shows us the tricks our brain plays on us without our knowledge, why our memories are so unreliable, our perspective of the present flawed and our view of the future coloured by present feelings and perceptions.
He combines all discoveries of science in a witty way to describe how our brain works and why it’s mostly wrong when it comes to past and future. He also explains the brain-eye conspiracy: How the brain interprets what the eyes see and the eyes see what the brain wants it to see. The experiments and studies where tricks are played on many innocent volunteer are interesting and funny to read. The book also shows how and why our brain cooks the facts for us and why that is beneficial to our own survival. Too bad it’s not so very beneficial to our search for happiness. At least the book gives an explanation of why we struggle so to find it.
Sample Quotes: ‘Once upon a time there was a bearded God who made a small, flat earth, and pasted it in the very middle of the sky so that human beings would be at the centre of everything. Then physics came along and complicated the picture with big bangs, quarks , brains and superstrings, and the payoff for all that critical analysis is that now most people have no idea where they are.’
‘The price we pay for our irrepresible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sends of them’
Vadimus Post Rating: A
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